'Breaking the law': a strange tale of tabloid TV

When a P.I. with years of experience working for commercial TV comes out with revelations about the tricks of his trade, it's intriguing. (File photo)

The Leveson Inquiry "into the culture, practice and ethics of the press" rolls on in Britain, causing headlines and filling column inches, in stark contrast to the low-profile Finkelstein media inquiry here in Australia.

That's not surprising. A cavalcade of celebrities; and of people who became involuntary celebrities because of the tragedies and crimes of which they were victims, and then became victims of the media because they were celebrities; and of repentant and unrepentant journalists who've been operating in the soiled trenches of tabloid journalism in Britain: they've all made the Leveson Inquiry irresistibly newsworthy.

By contrast, at the Finkelstein Inquiry we have heard mainly from editors and publishers, media academics, former and current chairs of the Press Council, plus a few other individuals whom Mr Finkelstein, for reasons that are far from transparent, has invited to air their views. So far we've heard from no front-line tabloid journalists, and no-one claiming to be a victim of a rampant Australian media.

The fulminations of Stephen Mayne and Robert Manne, opponents of News Ltd from way back, are no match for the anguish of Milly Dowler's parents, or for that matter, of Madeleine McCann's.

Indeed, it's possible to sympathise with the question that Fairfax Media's Greg Hywood put bluntly to Ray Finkelstein when he appeared at the inquiry: "Why are we here? What's the problem we're supposed to be fixing?"

At Media Watch, it's our business to know about people who've been unjustifiably victimised by the press. And to be honest, looking back over the four years that I've been in the chair, I can't think of any real parallels to the hounding of Gerry and Kate McCann, accused by the Daily Express and The Star (neither of them owned by News Corporation) of murdering their own daughter, or alternatively of selling her to help pay off the mortgage.

Of course there was Joanne Lees, accused by some in the media of being party in some way to the murder or disappearance of her boyfriend Peter Falconio. But it was the British press, not the Australian, that ran hard with that furphy.

More recently, we saw the Pulver family besieged in their own home when a collar bomb was found on their teenage daughter. But at least no-one accused Maddie Pulver, or her parents, of being conspirators rather than victims. You can't help feeling that in Britain, one newspaper or another would have done so, just to sell a few more copies.

Of course there have been some celebrated cases of privacy being invaded for reasons that, at least in our opinion at Media Watch, didn't stack up. The fake photographs purporting to be of the teenaged Pauline Hanson in News Ltd's Sunday papers; the "outing" of then-NSW transport minister David Campbell by Seven News; the exposing of then-NSW health minister John Della Bosca's affair by the Daily Telegraph. But the victims in all those cases were politicians. At least there was some shred of an argument that their private lives affected their public duties (although in the Hanson case especially it would have been paper thin, even if the photographs had been genuine).

In terms of the feral pursuit of the innocent, it has to be said, Australian tabloid newspapers are a model of taste and decorum compared to their British equivalents. And that's not surprising.

As many have pointed out before me, it is arguably the facts of geography that have preserved us from Britain's media excess. England and Wales form one compact media market in which seven or eight popular daily newspapers battle for share. Australia's metropolitan tabloids, by contrast, enjoy a monopoly in their own markets. They simply don't need to descend to the depths to outsell their rivals, because they don't, in most cases, have rivals – certainly not rival tabloid dailies - to outsell.

The fact that they are mostly owned by News Corporation, owners of the News of the World in the UK, is actually immaterial to this argument. If you accept the evidence to the Leveson Inquiry of former News of the World features editor Paul McMullan, his bosses Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson were 'criminals-in-chief' who nurtured and encouraged phone-hacking and other criminality at that paper. But the ethics of Britain's other tabloids don't seem to have been much better. Competitive fever, spurred on by ever-increasing desperation as newspaper sales in the UK have steadily fallen, drove down the ethical barriers.

For the same reason, I and others have pointed out, if you were looking for media excess in Australia, for behaviour that paralleled the phone-hacking and blagging and bugging and bribing we've seen revealed so graphically this year in the UK, you would look first at the Australian media markets that are ferociously competitive: the weekly celebrity magazines, and the tabloid television "current affairs" shows that battle it out daily in our homes.

The last time I made this suggestion it was greeted with outrage by the executive producers of A Current Affair and Today Tonight. "Where's the proof ?" they cried.

Well, for a start, when the hot human interest stories break, it's not tabloid daily newspapers, but the "current affairs" shows and the celebrity magazines that, time and again, compete to outbid each other in fierce little chequebook wars.

And for all the years that Media Watch has been going, the worst invasions of privacy, the worst examples of bullying the non-media-savvy, the worst cases of misrepresentation and character assassination, have come from those programs, rather than the tabloid papers. I can happily provide examples if requested. And occasionally – as in the concealed filming of David Campbell as he left a gay club in Sydney's east – the actual dirty work has been performed by private investigators, not by regular journalists (though they were working for Seven News in that case, not Today Tonight).

So when a private investigator with years of experience working for the media, and for commercial TV in particular, comes out with revelations about the tricks of his trade, it's intriguing, to say the least. Colin Chapman is a P.I. who has worked for Seven's current affairs programs, and before that, for Nine's, for years.

The Expendable Project is a group working to establish the innocence, and release from prison in Bali, of Schapelle Corby. For about a week, until last Friday, the Expendable Project posted a long interview with Col Chapman conducted by one of its volunteers. He made some startling claims about the methods used by 'contractors' working for media outlets who were attempting to prove that the Corby family was involved in drug trafficking.

He hadn't used these methods himself, Chapman claimed. But other contractors had attached GPS tracking devices to the Corby family's cars; had placed hidden microphones in their house; had sent a 'well-wisher' equipped with a concealed camera knocking on the Corby family's front door; and had 'hacked' the telephone voice mails, not just of the Corby family, but of numerous others.

(Despite all this illegal or dubious activity, said Chapman, not a skerrick of evidence was found that Schapelle or any of her family had been involved in drug trafficking.)

In general, claimed Chapman, the Australian media "would give Murdoch in the UK a fair run for his money in terms of who is getting up to inappropriate behaviour and inappropriate activities".

So, the interviewer asked, are the methods used by the Australian media comparable to those used by the News of the World? "Oh definitely, definitely, absolutely" replied Chapman, " I've worked for nearly all of them and the things that we get asked to do, they're always asking us to break the law in some way."

Chapman did not name Channel Seven as being the perpetrator of any of the "inappropriate behaviour" he claimed had taken place in Australia, although he did claim that Seven bribed prison guards in Bali to set up a concealed camera in Schapelle Corby's cell in Kerobokan.

The irony is that Chapman was himself deeply involved in Today Tonight's attempts to portray Schapelle's sister Mercedes as a drug smuggler. In early 2007, he was accused of posing as a representative from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to lure Mercedes to a meeting with Today Tonight's Brian Seymour. Today Tonight and Chapman denied the accusation, but an "unnamed investigator" – quite clearly Chapman - was quoted by the Daily Telegraph as saying: "I don't believe I am ethically immoral by telling lies to people like her to get her in a position where you can confront her''.

(Subsequently, of course, Seven lost a defamation action brought by Mercedes Corby. It was unable to convince a jury that the allegations it had aired about her were true, even on the balance of probabilities.)

Chapman fell out with Seven over that incident, and has been hawking his allegations around the mainstream media ever since. In March 2007, he told The Australian's Amanda Meade that he had taped some of the big names at Nine and Seven – including Seven's Director of News and Current Affairs, Peter Meakin -"revealing what they really think about the underhanded tactics they so publicly deride". He didn't produce the tapes then. He's made similar claims to other media outlets much more recently. But when it comes to the crunch the proof is never forthcoming.

Last week, I asked Peter Meakin for his reaction to Chapman's "Expendable Project" interview. He wrote to me last Thursday:

Try as I might, I cannot fathom what prompted Mr Chapman to make his allegations against Seven as there is not a hint of truth in them ...

We wrote to Mr Chapman earlier this week asking him to explain his ludicrous claims. Mr Chapman has now retracted any allegations of "impropriety, unethical or illegal behaviour" by Seven, its employees or contractors. Specifically, he now says that no-one from this Network ever asked him or anyone associated with him to perform any illegal acts.

So there were no bugs at the Corby home, no tracking devices on Corby vehicles and no other "dirty tricks". Mr Chapman has asked Expendable to do everything it can to withdraw his "interview" and any allegations against Seven and its employees from its website.

Sure enough, by the next day, the interview had been taken down from Expendable's website. And when, after days of trying, Media Watch finally managed to contact Col Chapman, he told us he could not say anything. He could not even confirm whether or not he had withdrawn the allegations he had made.

In the Expendable interview, Chapman and his interviewer had asked each other why the Finkelstein inquiry had been restricted to looking only at the press, and not at television. They seemed to think that its remit includes trying to establish whether methods similar to those used by the News of the World have been used in Australia.

In fact, the inquiry's terms of reference include no such investigative task. And in any case, as Colin Chapman and Expendable ought to know, Australian television is already subject to the oversight of a statutory regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority. If Chapman had any evidence at all that such dirty tricks have been used, I would have thought he would have taken it to ACMA.

I've thought carefully about whether to give Chapman's allegations the further publicity, and recognition, of being mentioned in this column. Peter Meakin is dismissive of what he calls "this lunacy":

Just think about it. We stand accused of spying on the Corby family and placing Space Age 'bugs' on their cars – devices which, according to my information, were only available to the military at the time we were allegedly playing James Bond. And how much of this mythical material was ever used to titillate our viewers? Zilch!

Well, as I said, Seven didn't actually stand accused of anything. Chapman did not say which media outlet did these things. On the other hand, if he has withdrawn his allegations, he has not clearly said so to us.

(UPDATE 13 December 2011: Although that this was true at the time of writing, Col Chapman made it clear to me yesterday that he has "unreservedly" withdrawn the allegations he made to Expendable, and has communicated that to Seven.)

What we do know is that that Seven's Today Tonight, and its rival, Nine's A Current Affair, are all too happy to use concealed cameras and microphones with precious little justification, especially in Queensland where the law is less restrictive than in most other states. For evidence of that, just look at this recent example.

In Britain, the phone hacking scandal was buried for years while the media and the police turned a blind eye. Only The Guardian and the New York Times kept the story alive. In the same way, most mainstream media will run a mile from the sort of allegations that Chapman is making.

That doesn't mean they are untrue. But it is really time Mr Chapman put up, or shut up.

I would be very surprised if Ray Finkelstein thinks that Chapman's allegations come within the purview of his inquiry. And I'm not sure whether it's within the legal powers of the ACMA to invite Mr Chapman to have a little chat. If so, maybe it should. Then maybe it could tell us whether it thinks that what Chapman told Expendable is "lunacy", or not.